Those of you who are reading this book and are not from the South (Georgia in particular) may be somewhat confused by the spelling of one of the words in the title.
That word would be “Dawgs.” I know the correct spelling for that word is “D-o-g-s,” but in Georgia, where I was born and where I currently live, we don’t spell it that way.
We spell it “D-a-w-g-s” because that’s the way we pronounce it, and we pronounce it a lot because the University of Georgia, where I went to school and where my heart remains, has had excellent football teams over the past quarter-century and we refer to those teams as the “Dawgs.”
Georgia’s official nickname is the “Bulldogs,” but nobody says that. What people say is “Dawgs,” as in “How ’bout them Dawgs!,” which also contains some grammatical indiscretions, but it’s an honored phrase by Georgia graduates, who use it after victorious games as a means of implying, “My, but isn’t our team a glorious group of scholar-athletes who have just kicked (hopefully, Auburn’s or Georgia Tech’s) butts!”
Georgia also once had a coach named “Butts.” Wally Butts, who guided the team in the forties and fifties. As a matter of fact, somebody wrote a book about him and entitled it No Ifs, No Ands, and a Lot of Butts, which should indicate the University of Georgia turns out some top book-titling talent as well as football players.
One of the questions readers ask me a great deal is, “Lewis, where do you get the titles for your books?”
I think that’s a good question, since my books do not have normal titles like other books have.
I like long titles. My first book was Kathy Sue Loudermilk, I Love You, written sometime around the end of World War I. I chose that title in honor of a girl in my school, Kathy Sue Loudermilk, who had large breasts in the fourth grade—by the time she graduated from high school, they had retired her pink sweater.
Then I got musical with Won’t You Come Home, Billy Bob Bailey?, which was a reference to my crack correspondent Billy Bob Bailey of Ft. Deposit, Alabama, whose dog Rooster once bit Alabama Governor George Wallace at a barbecue/fundraiser in Sylacage, Alabama. Rooster was sick for a week.
Then, another musical allusion, Don’t Sit Under the Grits Tree with Anyone Else but Me. That book included a piece on how I had sold grits trees to Yankees for great profit.
The others:
They Tore Out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat: again from a piece of music, the brilliant country legend “She Tore Out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat.”
If Love Were Oil, I’d Be About a Quart Low: My stepbrother, Ludlow Porch, himself an accomplished author (It’s Not So Neat to See Your Feet) gave me that one and charged me only fifty dollars for it.
Elvis Is Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself: from Mark Twain’s line “All great men are dying and I don’t feel so good myself.”
Shoot Low, Boys—They’re Ridin’ Shetland Ponies. I was sitting with a friend of mine, Ronnie Jenkins, at Lucille’s, a beer joint in Grantville, Georgia. Ronnie and I were both eighteen, but Lucille didn’t care how old you were. As long as you had thirty-five cents, she’d serve you a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer.
Ronnie and I had had several Pabst Blue Ribbon beers, and he suddenly said, “Shoot low, boys, they’re ridin’ Shetland ponies.”
I never did know why Ronnie suddenly said that, but it caught me as hilarious and I said to him, “One day, I’m going to write a book and name it what you just said.”
After the book was published, several people said the correct phrase is actually “Shoot low, Sheriff, they’re ridin’ Shetlands,” and it is from an old western movie. I don’t know if that is true or not, and I don’t care. The book sold a lot of copies, and I bought some great stuff with the royalties.
My Daddy Was a Pistol and I’m a Son of a Gun: That’s from a Roger Miller song, “Dang Me.” I think the publisher had to pay somebody in order to use that title.
When My Love Returns from the Ladies Room, Will I Be Too Old to Care?: I made that up by myself one night at Creekside Cafe in Atlanta, when I checked my watch and determined my date had been in the rest room for nearly half an hour. What do they do in there?
Don’t Bend Over in the Garden, Granny, You Know Them Taters Got Eyes. A singer friend of mine, Pat Horine, said that one night when we were laughing about song titles such as, “My Wife Just Ran Off with My Best Friend, and I Miss Him” and “You’re the Reason Our Children Are Ugly.”
As far as Chili Dawgs Always Bark at Night is concerned, I made that one up by myself, too. It came to me at four in the morning after I had eaten three chili dogs from Atlanta’s world-famous Varsity Drive-In restaurant, where they serve the best chili dawgs on earth. The Varsity’s secret, I think, is that their buns are always fresh and soft and they mix mustard into their chili.
What I was doing up at four in the morning after eating the three Varsity chili dawgs was looking for my jar of Maalox.
A little about the new book:
This is going to be an easy book for you to read because it is a collection of my works and there is no plot, so you don’t have to start at the front and work your way to the back if you don’t want to.
You can start at the back and work forward, or you can simply open the book in the middle and go whichever way it suits you to go.
You don’t have to fold down the ear of one of the pages to keep up with your place while you’re reading my book, either, because it really doesn’t matter where your place is.
This would be a good book to put into your guest bathroom. I figure the average person can read somewhere between three to four pieces out of this book while he or she is sitting on the john in your guest bathroom. That is, unless he or she has been eating Varsity chili dawgs, which would provide the guest the time and opportunity to read perhaps an entire chapter, or two, depending on whether or not the guest also had onions.
Here are some other titles I suggested for this book that my editor turned down:
The Adventures of Johnny Condomseed
Hold Her, Newt, She’s Headin’ for the Briar Patch
Satanic Nurses
Tammy Faye Bakker Is Uglier than a Bowling Shoe
Chili Dawgs Always Make Me Vomit
I have an excellent editor, his name is Peter, and maybe if I mention his name in this introduction, he’ll offer me a fat new contract for my next book, which may or may not be a novel entitled Good God, Harvey! They’ve Stolen Your Ass!
Yeah, I do write books because you get money for it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t do it. Instead, I would get myself a job in a convenience store in Florida and steal lottery tickets.
As many of you know, however, I donated a great deal of the money I have made from writing books toward my little brother Joey’s operation.
I can now report that Joey had his operation. A sex-change operation. He is now Joanne,
